


Substandard Motels (between broadway and carnegie hall)

by changdictator



Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fashion & Models, Angst with a Happy Ending, Eating Disorders, M/M, big fat tw:
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-09
Updated: 2020-07-09
Packaged: 2021-03-04 23:54:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,321
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25155034
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/changdictator/pseuds/changdictator
Summary: When it's too late for Kai to find his way home, Kyungsoo reminds him that he doesn't really need one.(model AU)
Relationships: Do Kyungsoo | D.O/Kim Jongin | Kai
Comments: 7
Kudos: 84





	Substandard Motels (between broadway and carnegie hall)

••••••••••••

“Some are born to pose,” was the only thing Eunhyuk said to Kyungsoo during the Fall 2010 Lee Juyoung show.

Eunhyuk was known for being a bipolar asshole, the once-a-decade model who came along with an attitude big as his monstrous shadow on the runway. Sometimes inexplicably sociable, soaking up all of the spotlight and spitting it back at anyone near him; sometimes small and barely there, with bones of knives and eyes of asbestos, Eunhyuk was a ticking-time bomb and the more make-up you piled on him, the greater the detonation.

Of course Kyungsoo knew better than strike a conversation with the end of his career, so he pulled the typical borderline committal “mm”. Besides, he was convinced that Eunhyuk was wrong: no one is born to pose, no one is born a photograph because humans are delivered awkward and hasty and it is for that reason that make-up artists like Kyungsoo exist: to swallow the imperfections, grease the joints, make their gawky poses expendable.

Barely glancing at Kyungsoo through the mirror, Eunhyuk continued to mumble things about, “Doesn’t matter how much shit you dump on their face. They’ll cling onto the toilet and vomit vodka polka-dots and you’ll think it was a scene for High Cut…” The words fumbled over his tongue and as the lights dimmed, they vaporized. Kyungsoo stopped thinking about it.

But two years later, with a boy throwing up bile and bloody nothings onto the bathroom tiles (because apparently even clinging onto the toilet was too hard on his toothpick bones) under his nose, Kyungsoo somehow remembers Eunhyuk’s words. _Some are born to pose._ Stripped of make-up, little blemishes on his skin exposed, and fingers curling in on themselves, this one lives a photo and it’s so stunning that Kyungsoo is shocked out of words.

“Mind… closing the door?”

It takes two seconds, stretches as long as two hours, for Kyungsoo to understand the request and process how he’s probably not supposed to see this. So he slams the door shut and rushes to the mirrors. Hitting the taps and smashing his hand down on the soap dispenser, Kyungsoo attempts making some noise. Anything sort of, even if the boy doesn’t care if he overhears him retching intestines out of cocksucker lips.

They’re in the backstage restroom of New York Gucci show, after all. This is what they do. This is what makes coweries and mudclothes beautiful.

Kyungsoo shouldn’t be surprised—he’s seen this before (wrists the sizes of fingers, eyes like august moons, and toothbrushes down hollow lipsticked teeth). But he’s never seen it so perfect like this.

••••••••••••

The boy’s name is Kai, says roll-call in Beijing Fall 2012, so Kyungsoo calls him that: “Kai.”

“Yeah,” Kai mutters, eyes stuck on a heavy paperback even though they’re glassy and not really reading. Staring holes through the pages, or maybe holes through his kneecaps underneath the pages. Models have weird habits and Kyungsoo has never been one to understand them, how Kyuhyun relieves stress on his laptop while Hyukjae throws glass vases at his manager and Heechul slaps everyone across the cheek.

Kyungsoo can’t take his eyes off of Kai’s face and it’s not because he’s overdone the ombr. It’s something between Kai’s gentle bones and hushed skin, and it takes Kyungsoo’s breath away the moment Kai leans forward and eyes widen at his name-tag, “Do Kyungsoo? Oh, you’re Korean!”

“Are you okay?” Kyungsoo has no idea what he’s saying (without question the worst thing he can say at this place and hour of the day) but the thought manifests on its own. He immediately thinks about how much time it would take to pack up all of his stuff when they fire him.

But Kai doesn’t seem all that offended. His lips break into a smile so genuine that Kyungsoo goes all anesthetized right there right then.

“The toilet?”

“Well if you don’t want to talk about it—”

“Everyone does it.”

“Yeah, but you’re only supposed to throw up the food, not your stomach too.”

“Sure,” Kai leans back into his chair, eyes hazy again and Kyungsoo knows that the conversation has been lost. Except Kai makes a comeback two unread pages later, while Kyungsoo is dusting pressed powder everywhere that makes him wince, “And your soul.”

“What?” Kyungsoo works his brush around the curved line of Kai’s jaw, not really listening.

Kai straightens up on his stool and turns to look at Kyungsoo with the same glassy eyes, “You’re also supposed to throw up your,” a cold hand stops Kyungsoo’s, “soul.”

There is the same genuine smile and this time Kyungsoo realizes that it’s never really been genuine the first time around. Then again, sometimes perfection is blinding like that.

He keeps powdering.

••••••••••••

In Seoul the winters are categorized under humid subtropical and humid continental but all Kyungsoo feels is frost over his window panes and wind biting his ears. He breathes white smoke and trembles his way into the corridors, past skittering models and human hangers. The shivers are still in his bones as he dumps his jacket on a chair, gathers around with the other staff, and entertains orders of I-want-this-and-that-and-it-should-be-like-lala-fucking-da.

Half-way across the room, Kai hollows his cheeks in on a cigarette, features distinct even though he’s drowning in flashes of numbing neon and chaotic shouting. Kyungsoo watches an older woman chisel his sockets with eyeliner and distort flesh with colored dust. Half a thought grows about dust to dust, but he gives up nursing it so all that’s left is just the graphite underneath his fingernails.

“We want a taste of the (twenty-first century) Korean Gatsby, with all the intense unadulterated undertones and shading but don’t make it too gaudy, keep it simple and Galliano so…”

Kyungsoo doesn’t always listen to directions. They make no sense anyway. No one around the place knows what he really wants because no one has understood fashion in words. (No one has understood fashion, period. All they see are mobs of shapes and throngs of colors, and not the slightest hint of the heuristic effect; the performance art; how embarrassing.) So Kyungsoo disperses from the crowd, picks up his case and gropes precision out with his fingertips in the pallets, lips tucked underneath teeth and eyes narrowed with focus. Perfection is a compulsive disorder and—

“Boo.”

“ _Shit_!”

His brush slips right through sweaty palms and hits the floor with a mocking thud. A cream cloud explodes over the cement floor and coats half of a black leather shoe that is almost certainly part of a set. Kyungsoo doesn’t bother glancing up at the Kai who has somehow managed to make it across thousands of stray linen webs in a few seconds, before stooping to his knees and rubbing away the blemish with his sleeve collar.

As the stain fades and Kyungsoo’s heart begins migrating back from his throat, he jerks up to glower at Kai, “Why would you do that?”

“Don’t look so bewildered,” Kai grins, about as genuine as last time except it’s a little cracked today. A smidgeon of purple liner under his eyes seems more alive than it should. Kyungsoo has no idea if Kai is just living the makeup again but maybe it doesn’t matter; this way or that the quantity of suffering is a conserved value. Today there might be a bruise painted but tomorrow there will be a smirk to take its place. “I saw you staring at me.”

“Yeah, I was,” Kyungsoo clutches Kai’s ankle with one hand for better balance. Almost all of the discoloration is gone and perhaps if he tries hard enough it can be reverted back to new.

The smile disappears from Kai’s lips and a vague imprint of shock is left hovering on his brows, “Straightforward. Why are you polishing my shoe?”

“Isn’t this part of your set?”

“No,” and the glimmer in his eyes returns, “It’s just a shoe. I haven’t changed yet. But if you keep on polishing like that, Kyungsoo hyung, it might become my favorite shoe.”

So Kyungsoo keeps on polishing far after the stain has left.

An hour later when he sees Kai’s face floating down first on the runway, chin low and eyes sweltering dark with something deeper than rage or lust, he understands the meaning of a Gatsby with intense unadulterated undertones, kind of. It’s something between terror and fervor, very close to perfection but far, far away.

••••••••••••

“Kyungsoo hyung!”

The only difference between Korean and English, Kyungsoo realizes with a tilt of the brows, is that one of them makes his ears pink. “Looks like we keep bumping into each other.”

“No, you keep bumping into me,” and it’s not until Kai laughs that Kyungsoo gets the joke.

They’re lost in New York. It’s spring, or supposed to be, except there are no blooming flowers; only the last clumps of gray winter snow trying to fight off extinction. Clouds of jaundice when you look down from the sky and impenetrable ash walls when you look up from the asphalt. The big, rotten apple. Liveliest place on earth: breathe in humanity and breathe out disco rays, yellow taxi cabs.

Post-show leaves Kai and Kyungsoo falling off adrenaline crests and into a bar in the middle of nowhere. Broadway, Kai pointed out, nose digging into his thick scarf (because when you’re as perfect as he is, nothing is ever warm enough), Broadway is right around the corner. Kyungsoo shrugged because he’s never been a big fan of Broadway, a cluster of bohemian theatres housing crude makeup, bulky lights, and shackled actors. Then Kai pointed to another direction on a whim and promised that Carnegie Hall wasn’t too far, either. Kyungsoo relented. It might have been because his fingers were cold.

He ordered a drink, which somehow brings them to the present of warm and fuzzy and fumbling, fingers eager to be drunk. Eager for the activities that I’m-so-drunk might excuse.

“I’m a good fuck,” Kai whispers, lips and teeth and maybe tongue, too, smearing against Kyungsoo’s earlobes thick and heavy.

His voice and jaws, sinking comfortably into Kyungsoo’s sweater, are riddled with alcohol, but his breath smells only of mint and mineral water. Kyungsoo sits back, gazes into the violet glow of the bar racks, takes a moment to assess what Kai is drunk on because he hasn’t even touched his Bombay Gin.

“I don’t doubt it.”

Kai sways back into his own spot, swinging one leg over the other so that the tip of his foot brushes a straight and blunt line right up from Kyungsoo’s ankle to knees, “For a splendid fuck like me, you’re sitting pretty far away.”

“For my collegiate sweater self, you’re thoroughly untouch—”

Kyungsoo doesn’t exactly finish his sentence because a pair of lips swallows the rest. It’s a clean kiss, no tongue or spittle, but somehow it’s laced with vice and makes Kyungsoo feel more than violated. When Kai lets him go, what is left falls out in a hard stammer, “untouchable.”

“Oh really,” Kai swipes his glass off the table and tilts back a good mouthful before moving forward for another kiss. Slower, coarser, stings of sweet alcohol. Kyungsoo takes another moment to wonder if it’s possible for bad kisses like these to be contagious before swallowing the burn and kissing back.

Somewhere between airports and five-star hotels, in other words a substandard motel buried under New Yorker skyscrapers, Kyungsoo discovers that Kai is as great a fuck as he promised. One second and his lush lips are all over Kyungsoo’s cock, confident eyes locked, and the next he’s sinking grating nails into pelvis. Low moans and high gasps, visible bruises and invisible whimpers, lucid eyes but desperate whispers; the end of one kiss begins another. Kai sweeps one finger down Kyungsoo’s spine and he caves in. All caution to the wind, souls, too. And hard shudders. He takes Kyungsoo from behind until they’re both a mix of sweat and saliva and maybe a few tears here or there, then lowers himself and rides out the white streaks dripping off his abs.

It’s supposed to be a one-time deal, and because it is a one-time deal they have the luxury of leaving nothing behind except a few condom wrappers. And maybe two handprints on the still-misted bathroom mirror: here one moment, gone the next together with their footsteps down the peeling corridors.

Since Kyungsoo likes handprints and Kai is fond of fiddling with multi-colored wrappers as he waits for Kai to free up the shower, they promise each other, “it’s still a one-time deal” even during the third, fourth, fifth encounter. Milan. Tokyo. Beijing. Moscow. London.

“You’re really bumping into me, aren’t you, Kyungsoo hyung?”

“You’re just that good.”

••••••••••••

“I’ve lost track,” Kai says one day, while they’re behind the cameras and Kyungsoo is checking the texture of a new tube of lipstick. He dumps an arm over Kyungsoo’s shoulder and the gesture makes Kyungsoo uncomfortable, even though they’ve been closer before. It’s hot; Kai’s arm sticks to the perspiration on Kyungsoo’s neck, but the shadows where their flesh meets are still cold. Somehow there is an air of insincerity, of Kai’s-not-really-here-today. Maybe it’s that.

“Where am I from again?”

“Seoul, South Korea, Asia, Earth, The Milky Way,” Kyungsoo chimes, a self-satisfied grin on his lips. Half a point for wit, he thinks, except when he looks at Kai it’s clear that what Kai wants isn’t wit.

Kai probably doesn’t want an answer. He lets his hand fall and turns around to wave, smile as genuine and flawless as ever, “Oh Sehun!”

••••••••••••

“So,” Kyungsoo starts, cuffing his sleeves leisurely. It takes him a few times to get the lines straight, probably because his bones are still soft from Kai’s touch. He glances at the model, who is still in his briefs, cuddling up Kyungsoo’s prints and warmth on the hotel sheets despite the suffocating heat of summer, “How many?”

“How many what?”

“Other than Sehun and me, who else?”

“Why?”

“Just curious.”

“Luhan, Suho, Taemin, a couple others,” Kai doesn’t bother lifting his head up from the pillows, and from here Kyungsoo sort of thinks that maybe perfection looks a little on the thin side today. He can count Kai’s ribs from two meters away and the way his elbows jut out looks a little more than the usual bones of blade. An image or two pass of a boy twisting himself inside out on fancy bathroom tiles. He lets them fade.

“Aren’t Sehun and Luhan in a relationship, though?”

“I’m there to spice up their sex lives. All that jazz.”

Kyungsoo goes back to the bed and sits at the edge. Not quite touching, but almost. Just enough to see the way Kai’s spine sticks out the back of his neck, not enough to reach out and tuck them back in. There is a slight musing that, maybe, he’d like to reach out and fix things. Except it’s distant, and floats away with each breath.

“Why so sad?” Kai rolls on his elbow and props his head up on a palm, gazing intently at the turn on Kyungsoo’s lips, “If you want me to stop, all you have to do is ask me out.”

“To what?”

“I like Broadway,” and he takes Kyungsoo’s hand, smooths it over the ridges of his neck and nuzzles his forehead on the other’s thigh. The way his lips tilt is weak and feeble, cracking at the edges and barely there. Still, Kyungsoo believes that today, today Kai is here.

So he takes Kai to Broadway, and tries to learn the compulsion behind shackled lights and loud music with Kai’s hands down his jeans.

••••••••••••

After a few months, in the midst of brightening serums and sun-dipped bronzing powders, Kyungsoo almost gets used to wiping stomach acid off of Kai’s lips. The process is simpler now; stream-lined for efficiency, because after all in the line-ups Kai is just another face and Kyungsoo is just another artist. Kai no longer tells Kyungsoo to close the door while he coughs up liquid flesh and Kyungsoo no longer pretends to wash his hands.

“Except you’re not really dating me, are you?”

“What?” Kai sputters, turns his head to glance at Kyungsoo and gags on empty. Heaves up nothing but trembling fingers and white knuckles.

“You’re dating an idea. An ideal. You’re in love with perfection and I’m just here to… what, complete the triangle? You know, so you won’t be the only one in unrequited love,” Kyungsoo clarifies, waiting for Kai to decide that enough is enough so that he can drown him in primer and move onto others.

“So you’re saying you’re in unrequited love?” Kai grins, full lips pouted and eyes twinkling and it all looks so painfully good next to shiny white porcelain and smooth stone tiles. A handful of disheveled hair and transparent blood makes everything sparkle.

“Yeah, with Kai.”

“But everyone is.”

And Kyungsoo thinks that’s the saddest thing he’s ever heard.

••••••••••••

Even when they’re not clustered together at the back of runway shows or cover shoots, Kai still asks Kyungsoo to paint his face.

“‘Cause I like the way you look at me,” Kai explains while knocking back whiskey on the terrace of some Tokyo (or is it Tuscany?) hotel. He might have arrived under-dressed and bare-backed for the party, but no one bats an eye because here skin is just another layer of clothing.

Still, Kyungsoo knows that even the perfect aren’t immortal. He slides his blazer over Kai’s angled shoulders with a complacent, “Sure.”

Sure isn’t enough. Grinning from behind exaggerated shoulder-pads and cufflinks, Kai stares at Kyungsoo in the eyeballs breathless, hard, and demanding, “You go all squinty from concentration and you purse your lips. Like you’re upset or something. It’s cute. Come on. Do it for me.”

Kyungsoo doesn’t refuse, of course. He wouldn’t resist a chance to paint on the ideal canvas, but he doesn’t know if he wants to look at Kai tonight. This is one of those times when Kai’s soul has been left behind in some bathroom stall and Kyungsoo doesn’t feel like lending his own. So he picks the cigarette from his teeth and taps it tentatively with a forefinger. Ashes falling like stars. A veil of smoke shields the august moon in Kai’s eyes. Looking away from the vortex, Kyungsoo puts his attention on the shot glass between Kai’s fingers.

Some shrieks and laughter erupt from the after-party below, albeit all he can hear is Kai’s unsteady breathing. He drops his joint in Kai’s drink, “I don’t have any tools on me.”

Kai doesn’t mind. He smiles, eyes twinkling as he leans back towards the railing, crosses his feet, and props his weight up with both elbows. Tilting just enough to bring his eyes steady in Kyungsoo’s, he laces his fingers between Kyungsoo’s. Joints bump and calluses sand Eucerin serum as he mouths, “You have your fingers and,” gaze grazing, “tongue.”

And Kyungsoo learns that the difference between sketching under the sky and under the vanity lights is that one kills the perfection while the other seduces it. With the sterling rays trickling down Kai’s forehead Kyungsoo can only see sparkling porcelain and grey fingertips, and with each second he’s increasingly convinced that it’s not lips that he’s kissing but a cold creation. Or the leftovers of one.

(Gaunt is better defined by the contours of Kai’s bones than a few leisurely phrases from a dictionary.)

They pull away and Kyungsoo is blind from fear. The first thing he runs for is the toilet. Who knew retching intestines out of cocksucker lips would prove contagious?

••••••••••••

Sometimes Kyungsoo likes to imagine that Kai isn’t really all that flawless. Maybe he has a teenaged face at home who, when no one is looking, coops up on the couch Saturday mornings to watch cartoon reruns in sunlight puddles. Maybe there is a side of him that misses home in Seoul every now and then and secretly searches for photos of his hometown on the internet.

And then he remembers that it’s Saturday morning and Kai isn’t at home on a couch watching cartoon reruns because he’s hanging in a puddle of sweat or maybe vomit (or tears) over Kyungsoo’s leg, tangled up in bruises and scratches and hung-over moans. This kind of person wouldn’t recall what kind of hometown he comes from because he’s born of plastic and measurements, and more importantly he wouldn’t care.

“Get up, we’re going to miss our flight…”

He pushes his toe against Kai’s chest and the brunette stirs, slowly, with a smile that Kyungsoo looks away from. Persistent, Kai wraps his fingers around Kyungsoo’s foot and presses a kiss to the arch, the ankle, the knee, the hips. Weary laughter drowns in Kai’s parted lips, swollen from sleep. They try to murmur vows about love, art, and the future while fucking the indecencies out of one another, slow and filthy under the same puddle of sunlight Kyungsoo once thought they could watch Disney flicks in. The tempo is too slow and Kyungsoo finds himself praying for it to end.

Later that day they pack their bags for another part in the world and Kyungsoo surprises himself when he almost walks off with Kai’s suitcase. Belongings without identities are too easy to mix up.

Kai doesn’t seem to care about that, either.

Other times Kyungsoo stops between Italy and China mid-stroke, kabuki brush paused, attempting to decipher the invisible words scrawled over Kai’s face. They are over everyone’s faces: Hyukjae’s blared ‘I want out of this place’ in red and Heechul’s the subtler ‘kiss my ass’ in glowing green. But unlike them, Kai’s face is blank. It’s the perfect artist’s canvas, all soft eyes and closed lips, rounded cheeks with stubborn brows, and it horrifies Kyungsoo because if he doesn’t look hard enough maybe Kai is part of the set. Maybe Kai is just a breathing ornament, designed with great pain like his favorite shoe or newest scarf.

“Don’t you get sick of… you know, this whole thing?” Kyungsoo asks, while breathing down the hollow of Kai’s throat in the name of dusting Adam apples, “Celery sticks and vodka shots and sleeping pills.”

“Not really,” Kai shrugs, picking away a loose strand of hair. His reflection judges him intently from within the vanity mirror, “If I did I wouldn’t be here.”

“Well maybe it could be like an addiction. Like you don’t really want it but it’s a habit, so you crave it even though you don’t really enjoy—”

“Nope, I want it,” a quick grin, “Can’t the same be said of you?”

“It’s different. I come only when they ask for me, and when it’s all done I go home. Make dinner. Have a life, and all the good stuff. I can still separate lipstick from blood,” and Kyungsoo wants to ask Kai to come with him tonight, maybe, for all the good stuff. Except he knows that all he will be leading home is a hanger with designer clothes, perfect nails, and not much else.

“But you like your job, don’t you?”

“Do you?”

“I don’t like anything, really. What else can I do?”

The thing is, Kyungsoo realizes as he watches Kai skitter down the runway legs straight and jaws set, sporting shiny latex and inflated PVC sculpture-coats, he really can’t do much else. White isn’t a color that anyone wants to buy. Like tickets to Broadway, it’s something that people rent for entertainment because at the end of the day white slips between their fingers and corrodes to dust. At the end of the day they’re all humans, and Kai is really a patchwork of grey and gray.

••••••••••••

As Kai comes closer, time and space drift further. Kai makes sure that they book the same shows and when they do, everything shifts, turns, and goes out of focus. Minute hands don’t matter because they’ll be late anyway. Airport terminals and hotel corridors twist into an elongated möbius strip and fatigue renames itself oroborus.

Kyungsoo tries to find comfort with memories of Seoul: his old apartment and its tattered doormat, the street vendor lady who serve him extra soondae, the stilted taro plant he’s forgotten to water again. But at the end of each memory he can only remember that he’s not in Seoul, again. Broadway is too flashy, Kai’s scarves are waxing neon, and clocks are useless when time zones insist there can be more than twenty-four hours in a day.

He wants something more out of Kai and he’s not really sure what it is, because Kai gives him everything—after-hours in the cab (when he presses his knee into Kyungsoo’s thigh, hands somewhere in between, and as Kyungsoo tries to keep the moaning down with teeth in bottom lips, he only smirks), rolling around and together in the sand, catching thunderstorms on the top of high rises in wherever they are (it doesn’t matter because they’ll be electrocuted regardless the country). There are the high tides of glamour, and when it pulls away, their body imprints in the sand, which Kai interprets as romance and Kyungsoo as fornication. What else is there to want?

Perhaps to hold hands—

How embarrassingly adolescent.

The steps of a relationship like theirs go something like this: fascination, lust, disillusionment, rage, then the inevitable falling apart. And the fact of the matter is that Kyungsoo knows. By the time he has memorized the curve of Kai’s spine and the shape of his palm, the attraction will fade. Kai is a novelty for him (the one who flies back to Seoul), and he is just another plaything for Kai (the one who keeps on flying) and although neither say it, it’s louder than any of the words they have ever exchanged.

••••••••••••

Seoul comes half past noon with girls in jean shorts and big LCD screens flashing pretty faces. In the unconsciousness of light kisses over deceitful pledges, they swerve past familiar alleys and into Kyungsoo’s apartment. It’s a decent-sized exercise in tinted, warm colors. Maple and birch hardwood line the floors under white curtains, baby blue couches. They leave footprints in the dust that has gathered over the living room, incomplete toes dotting smudged heels.

Kai drops his suitcase anywhere as he clambers after Kyungsoo’s straight line to the kitchen stools. Swinging his arm over Kyungsoo’s shoulder, he breathes down Kyungsoo’s neck while they dig up old recipes from fraying notebooks. They point to this and that. Vegetables look good and we haven’t had tofu in a while but hey we have to go to the market do you even have any won on you oh never mind I’ve still got enough whatever hyung let’s go already and the door shuts again. Dust blows out the window.

To make lunch, stir-fry kimchi until translucent, add soup base, meat, tofu, and tell Kai that even if he drinks the whole bottle of Pinot Noir and passes out on the carpet, “You’ll still have to eat. You promised.”

“No, I’ve had—”

“One vitamin tablet, two martinis, half an olive, seven tic tacs since twelve hours ago. You promised you’d eat with me, Kai.”

“Okay, I promised.”

They light candles and pull the curtains shut while red wax pools on translucent holders. Kai arranges the flowers he’s picked up and pokes at Kyungsoo’s taro plant, makes statements about longevity and connectivity. If Kyungsoo squints and goes along with Kai, they could be one of those couples in the Broadway musicals singing about the joy of life while eating plastic grapes from acrylic plates.

“It might be a little spicy.”

Sitting his goblet down, Kai stares with difficulty at a slice of pork laying on the spoon Kyungsoo holds out towards him, almost as if he’s forgotten the function of nutrition. The tension in Kyungsoo’s stomach slowly relocates to his limbs and he bites down as Kai takes the piece into his mouth. Chews. Swallows. No fireworks or breathless anticipation, just one guy staring wide-eyed while the other grins, “No hyung, did you pour the whole pepper jar in here or something?”

The whole meal (one bowl of rice, one bowl of soup, three glasses of wine, four slices of radish) goes down so easily with a little light chatter and half-hearted laughter that Kyungsoo is almost not surprised to see Kai slip away as soon as they settle on the couch.

“I have to get going. Got a fitting in an hour,” he says by the door, suitcase back in his hand because he was never here to stay, “Thanks for the food, hyung.”

Before Kyungsoo can even respond that he, too, is leaving for a show, the door has already clicked closed. Kyungsoo scares himself thinking that it’s almost as if Kai was never here at all. He packs his bags, checks his phone on the way, and presses speed-dial one while Taemin waits for his hair to be clipped up.

“Yes hyung?” Kai picks up on the fourth ring.

A beat before music, the same kind of thudding soul-numbing tracks they play down the catwalks, crawls into Kyungsoo’s fingers, “Where are you?”

“At my fitting.”

For some reason when Kyungsoo shuts his eyes all he can see is Kai’s footprints leading to a bathroom. He wonders if he would follow that trail. Would he then let his bones relax into the doorframe, eyes around Kai’s hunched figure, and voice between Kai’s hacks and whimpers? Would he smile and ask, _“How is it?”_

_“You’re a good cook,”_ Kai would say. Something like that. And then he would hold up a forefinger, all pruned skin over bulky, nodular joints so that Kyungsoo presses his eyelids closed until the flush of the toilet. When he opens his eyes, he would catch Kai with the same old perfection. And a little kiss of vomit on his chin.

“What are you wearing?”

“That smile you gave me.”

Except Kyungsoo is pretty sure he hears Kai’s breathes hitching with muffled coughs again. The distant flush of a toilet and Kyungsoo hangs up. Turning to Taemin, he wonders if it’s his fault that he can’t carry on or if it’s Kai’s fault for living the wrong reality. And Taemin simply lifts his brows, lips curved gently.

But Kyungsoo is beginning to grow tired of seeing bared teeth. He diagnoses this as the prelude to disillusionment.

••••••••••••

On the shores of Cala d’en Serra, Kyungsoo comes to realize that there is not enough of Kai left behind his bright scarves and husky laughter and that he can’t continue a relationship with a mannequin. Even in the möbius strip, wearing clocks with missing hands, a kiss is only a kiss and a whisper is just a whisper. Coloring a picture is one thing but loving that picture is another; he doesn’t want something to hang on his walls because he doesn’t want to be the one to take it off.

“Kai,” he takes Kai’s face in his hands and it’s surprisingly warm. Kyungsoo wonders why he ever thought it would be cold because it’s human, after all. Kai’s human, Kai’s a real person named Jongin, when he feels like it, even if all of this aches like a reenactment of warmth, “Kai, do you like me?”

“Sure,” Kai answers, voice deep and uneven. Kyungsoo falls asleep feeling awfully like crying.

He dreams of Kai taking a week off between seasons to fly to Bavarian Alps. Ragged white and black fangs puncturing the clouds until all of it cries an ocean of green. In the dream, he sits at home and phones Kai with a glass of seventy-proof alcohol that tastes something like sleeping pills, “What are you up to?”

“Teleporting.”

The radio hums with monotonous exclamations and demands and it disappears altogether under the way Kai’s breaths (in, out, in, out) washes up past the receiver and right into Kyungsoo’s ear. Something somethings between pants and gasps.

“Please don’t tell me you’re living off of tic tacs and vitamin pills again.”

“It’s part of my job.”

“No one told you to look like a damned wire hanger.”

“Hyung, you just don’t understand. This is the price for perfection—”

“But you don’t have to be perfect.”

“No, hyung. _No_. I do. I _want_ this.”

“Come on, Kai, I’m not some stupid spectator. I know what you’re playing at. You don’t care if it’s perfection you’re going at. You just want to suffer, don’t you? You’re bored and you just want to suffer for fun because there is never ‘enough’ when it comes to attention, is there? I was your audience and you weren’t a model, you never were, Kai. You were just a hunger artist—fuck, Kai, you were a better artist than—”

“Shut up!”

“Damn it just tell me whatever the fuck do you want? Sympathy? Admiration? Respect? Pity? What do you want, Kim Jongin? What the fuck can I do to make things fucking _enough_?”

Cold silence. Kyungsoo can't feel his soul.

  
  
“Do Kyungsoo, don’t you dare ever call me Jongin again.”

And Kyungsoo dreams that after they hang up, Kai will scrunch up into a ball before the toilet. Dipping his fleshless hands into the vomit basin, he'll scrub at his face; try to wash off the makeup thick like icing on his face while throwing up everything from charcoal to cigarette smoke, because what else does he eat? Half of Kyungsoo wants to imagine that he grabs Kai by the neck and screams at him to stop, that he’s perfect enough, that he doesn’t have to be. But then the other half remembers that in this dream he’s in Seoul, and Kai’s not even on the same continent. It's all too helpless, so he curls up in a ball. Perhaps tighter than Kai's. Hugs his knees and kicks his phone and kisses it and hates it and consoles himself that, “At least Kai cares enough to claw the makeup off… at least he knows he’s wearing makeup.”

With tears cold and filmy over his lashes, Kyungsoo wakes up to a dark room and the vague contours of Kai’s face. He feels Kai’s fingers lingering on his cheek, and Kai’s voice so much softer than it had been in his dream, “Hyung, I’m sorry.”

Sometimes things fall apart not with a raging bang, but a muffled whimper inside down-feathered pillows.

••••••••••••

It’s either March or November when the season ends and Kyungsoo goes back to Seocho, Seoul. He’s surprised that the key still fits in his apartment door and that his taro plant is alive. When the soondae lady waves him over for extras as if he’s never gone, and Baekhyun from across the hall continues singing the same song in his shower, Kyungsoo swears he can’t feel his face for one reason or another. Nothing has moved on without him. Kyungsoo thinks it might mean they were waiting for him. The stokes have to be in place before the wheel turns and this scene, of sweltering warmth and smiles that aren’t on the lips, is where he belongs. Not between time zones and passport stamps, but home.

He forgot to ask for Kai’s address when they parted ways in Amsterdam (was it?), though Kai wouldn’t have given him a valid one anyway.

As time passes Kai doesn’t call, and it’s probably because he’s changed his phone number, so he convinces himself to stop waiting. Life moves on. Workshops, collaborative projects, part-time gigs work themselves between tasting soup from the pot and bumping into Baekyun’s bright-teethed boyfriend in the hallway, who claims that his eye-twitches are due to some sort of manufacturing defect. The taro plant finally withers, and Kyungsoo replaces it with a calendar.

“I got ripped off,” he complains to the Baekhyun, when they bump into each other on the staircase, “The store owner said taro plants are supposed to last forever.”

“Nothing lasts forever,” Baekhyun chuckles, “Duh Kyungsoo, I thought you knew that much.”

••••••••••••

Kyungsoo’s version of the post-break-up story is a pathetic photocopy of drown-your-sorrows-in-work. But this time the story goes differently because, and he’s made a list for this (on the back of a drugstore receipt with a dulled green brow-liner), one—more shows would only mean more chance encounters with Kai; two—they haven’t really broken up yet; and three—there isn’t anything to break up, actually.

Kai proves the last point when Spring 2013 begins thirty-six days later in the backstage of Vivienne Westwood. The same novel rests on his lap and he’s on the same page, thumb and glassy gaze resting on the same words and it’s almost as if time has never really moved for him. White light paints ceramic planes with sharp corners over his face and leaves the rest in inoffensive shades of graffiti-cement. Even if he’s somehow rewound from a twenty-first century Korean Gatsby (new romantice maybe) into a demented afterimage of the Baroque boy (old pagan stains), all flourishing gold, red, and violet splaying across his cheeks like watercolor and tea, gaunt is still gaunt and emaciated is always emaciated. Kai has changed so little that Kyungsoo begins wondering if the thirty-six days of Seoul were only a sigh’s length in reality.

A whirlwind of mixed French and English pounds from megaphones and into contemporary rock beats (Westwood always has the best music), leaving Kyungsoo and Kai in the eye of the storm where everything is still. Where Kyungsoo thinks he can hear Kai’s brittle fingers gliding against rows of black ink on yellowing pages and the murmur of his pen over Kai’s inner rims.

With something between boredom and passing intrigue, something that says that says _just making conversation_ despite the inflections, Kai grazes the blank fixation in Kyungsoo’s furrowed brows. “Why did you change your number?”

“I didn’t think you’d want to call me,” Kyungsoo mutters, syllables soft as the stardust settling into crevices of iridescent powder, “We were just a one-time deal, prolonged.”

Kai catches Kyungsoo’s gaze, moves his jaw lightly, but a backstage reporter breaks into the make-up station adjacent and the storm’s eye looks elsewhere. Kai’s jaw clench again and Kyungsoo drowns fast in the shrill chatter. Breathless and helpless. But perhaps it’s alright. He imagines the woman turning to them next, stuffing the microphone in Kai’s face to hear regurgitated enthusiasm, and as easily as that Kai will evade having to correct the truth. Neither of them will protest it because they both know that this situation doesn’t merit the efforts of a lie. A singular collision in time is better brushed off than expounded.

Except Kai doesn’t actually brush it off; he simply talks over it, as if he’s never heard Kyungsoo at all, “My agent has two spare tickets to a Broadway show, after NYFW…”

“Are you inviting me?”

“I’m only trying to help you bump into me,” Kai grins, but it’s not a joke and neither of them are laughing.

How unironical, Kyungsoo decides, two pretending to watch a game of pretense, not the one on Broadway but their own. And he nods along, because maybe a little bit of Kai has rubbed off on him. Maybe he too wants to indulge a little in suffering. The charcoal in his hand is thin enough to snap, but it’s still thicker than the invisible line connecting his soul to Kai’s beautiful mouth.

“You should try reading that,” he suggests pointedly.

“The words are always there, anyway. I’ll read when I—”

“They publish stuff with disappearing ink these days, you know.”

Flash and someone snaps a picture of them: Kai’s twinkling provocateur beam, Kyungsoo’s squinty fixation (and trembling hand), and the book with ink that might disappear (but they’ll never know because Kai will never see the end).

••••••••••••

(Sex is something like purging.)

They don’t end up in Broadway. They end up in a substandard motel killing time and little bits of each other, smearing handprints down shower doors and bucking up against white porcelain tiles. Kyungsoo inhales humidity, obscenities, exhales heat and sparks on fingertips, exhales torn moans and shredded sighs. Heels slip down the arch of the spine; lips and marrow-deep sighs fuse with the shivering cartilage under Kai’s taut skin. And when a name is strangled in Kyungsoo’s throat he realizes that he doesn’t really know what to call a subhuman concept.

(But purging is nothing like sex.)

••••••••••••

Zitao, intern make-up kid from Qingdao with a handful of convenient Korean obscenities, joins Kyungsoo post-show while coordination staff clears the hall. Midnight arrived hours ago and whisked along with it all the beautiful people to palaces of champagne and chandelier. What remains is a hollow combination of chairs dragging against fountain floors, backstage chaos still ringing in ears, and the mists of green glitter that manifests with every blink.

The couch is sticky on the back of Kyungsoo’s arm. He subconsciously counts the number of minutes passing before he passes out with them.

Muttering about darker hues on noses and shit didn’t anyone see the clumped mascara there I told them not to blink so are we screwed or what, they take turns jabbing fingers at the little monitor on a portable television set until Kai comes on the screen. That is when Zitao stops digging into his bag of potato chips and rambling breathing jittering, “God.”

It takes Zitao a little while to come up with something more adequate. “Look at him. He’s literally flawless. Not just the proportions or the face but, like—”

“The air,” Kyungsoo provides. It’s not a difficult answer. Kai puts it up on his face like a neon board, all of his cruelly audacious suffering, above the faint lips and below the smoldering scowl: a help me please, and a fuck your charity. Kyungsoo recalls something about a boy boxed into a white cubicle, throwing up liquid meat and transparent soul and flushing it all away. He lets it go.

“Yeah the air about him,” Zitao contemplates the snapshot, “There is something awfully right with him in the wrongest way, like he’s exhausted beyond sensibility but in a really hot way and it’s kinda freaky. Did you see his eyes? It’s like—he’s—empty—or something.”

So he’s empty, Kyungsoo thinks. How very, very clever. Maybe if he strains enough Kai can be the purest distillation of empty. The literal essence of empty. Maybe Kai is only so attractive because he has flushed away all of his flaws down the toilet, and so empty because along with the flaws went the identity. Perhaps the current Kai is a living snapshot of the seconds before Jongin disappeared, immune to time and position.

At some point Kyungsoo passes out with the minutes, while plucking out the bricks on the wall between perfection and empty and wondering if it’s possible to keep one and kick the other.

What wonderful wishful hoping.

••••••••••••

Stale, suffocating fog clogs Rome on the brink of spring. The clouds squeeze a shade of blue into a grey sky, presses down on the cityscape through an invisible glass divide. Some confetti and this can be a postmodern snow globe.

Leaning on the rusted railing of the fire escape, Kyungsoo highlights phrases in a magazine with cigarette ashes. “The concept is elegant and very chic,” which is pretty much every other concept, “Antique gold on the lids, tainted, mysterious brown eyes, shimmering cheekbones; it’s the old fashioned take on glamour,” better to say an ennui with recycling grunge, “all very exciting.”

“Very exciting,” he parrots, not without a scoff.

General mayhem unwinds two steps behind him, the typical photoshoot frenzy with a pinch of panic. With a calculated drag of nicotine, Kyungsoo shuts his eyes and submerges himself in the frantic shouting about where’s Kai weren’t you just talking to him; and I don’t know he was around just a second ago and he said that he needed to take a breather and I don’t know, I don’t know, okay he’s not the type to just walk out of shoots so I—we can’t have a fucking shoot without the damned model, you moron—but he looked _fine_ really, he didn’t look upset or anything I just thought...

And before he knows it he’s dropped the joint down the metal staircase and scrambled past the shouting coordinators. Sprinting down the basement corridors, makeup kit bumping bruises on his back, Kyungsoo tries to convince himself that he’s running for nowhere until he steps into the bathroom and Bam Bam Bam, the third stall swings open to a scene that is a little too picturesque.

Kyungsoo drops his kit and the clatter is clear, but neither of them hears it.

Kai is propped up against the wooden wall, eyes lidded and an occasional flutter of the lashes. One arm dangles off the plastic seat, sharp elbow and jagged wrist and forefinger drawing echoes in the water below; the other slumps, concealing something alarmingly bright under his palm. He’s barely breathing, chest trembling under silk that exaggerates what little motion there is, legs angled for distortion. Too long, too thin, too hard. A film of glaring light over his chin.

“Kai…” the first whisper comes out purely as a statement, and the second one, “Kai?” as a combination of questions: why aren’t you moving? what is that bottle in your hand? are you alive?

“Mm,” and Kai shifts in a dour attempt to lift his head. Decay takes him first so he simply flops over. Eyes cracked and colorless. Crimped hair smears between his cheek and the wall and he makes an ugly squeak, “Kyungsoo hyung.”

Kyungsoo doesn’t wait to listen to what Kai has to say before he pries the bottle out of Kai’s hand and dumps a handful of pills and, “These had better be—”

“They’re just anti-acids ‘nd painkillers, don’t worry,” Kai interrupts, a bark of pathetic energy as if to prove that all the vomit and stains and translucent skin are only effects. And maybe they are. Just effects. Just a giant fucking neon _Fuck Your Charity_ with a _help me now_ printed in the subtitles.

“You’re fucking unbelievable, fucking really…” Kyungsoo chuckles, dry heaving laughter over sobs, because what else can he do? Throw the little ivory tablets on the ground? Crush them with his heel, or better yet shove them in Kai’s swollen red lips until he chokes and sputters them back, raining confetti in their impeccably demented globe? Tear down the walls and scream for everything to stop please just stop because what else can he do?

“Hey, it’s okay, let’s not get upset here,” Kai mutters. The glint is back in his eye and it looks comically pretty atop the bile and blood and smudged powder a shade too light (always a shade too light). “You’ve seen this before. Fix me.”

And Kyungsoo does it. A mechanical habit.

Today he skips the brushes and digs into Kai’s bones with fingers and beige foundation, hard enough to bruise but not hard enough to rip because flesh is the last thing Kai has, stretched taut and thin. Thumbing concealer under the eye and palms cupping bronze on cheeks, forehead. Crimson middle finger over the lid, blue pinky under the waterline. Flesh gliding over flesh, separated by a layer of artificiality. Setting powder slapped in sync with the loud bass thumping from the corridor and it’s so sad, all of this, “Why do I do this for you?”

“It’s your job,” Kai grins, and it might be a joke, but Kyungsoo isn’t laughing anymore. He smoothes Kai’s locks, shredding strands from a sticky scalp with military precision, clips away all the excess and leaves just enough pain for it to look awfully right in the wrongest of ways. And because Kyungsoo has ran out of laughter, Kai gives him a hand, “So there’s this bar I found that’s got some amazing ambiance.”

(Sometimes sobs can sound a little like giggles, if you really want to believe it.)

The shoot turns out to be surrealist haute couture. Kyungsoo watches as Kai disappears under latex petals and vinyl lips. Shutters flicker at bodies drenched in powder paint, stylized Kabuki physiognomies. While highlighting more magazines with tar, Kyungsoo muses that they could’ve just moved the set to the fucking bathroom an hour ago for the same outcome.

••••••••••••

The sun comes down during Roberto Cavalli. Milan on a Friday. A haze of lukewarm light and bitter winter outside, stuffy A/C and monochrome light bulbs for the bare-chested models inside. Kyungsoo is assigned to Luhan, a soft-spoken Beijing boy perpetually adjusting his emerald green pea coat and cropped purple trouser. He looks somewhat befitting of Sehun’s passing dub (oriental peacock), Kyungsoo thinks, perhaps due to how he fidgets. Unsure but confident.

“They always ask about hometowns,” Luhan mumbles, as Kyungsoo slides an extra line of talc and kaolin down his nose, “But it’s not like they care. I mean it makes no difference to them. Tokyo or Busan, Beijing or Bangkok, all they hear is ‘Asian’. Like the giant country of Asia. Next time I might say that. Hi, I’m Luhan and I’m from Asia. Hah.”

“Sometimes I forget where I’m from,” Sehun cuts in, pressing idly on the counter while someone snaps a photo, “All this traveling and you don’t really _want_ to remember,” and a smug little tilt of the lips for the smartassed remark, “Plus each time someone tells you who you are—cinematic Sicilian today, for example—they tell you who you aren’t, which is _you_. And then around the end of the walk, there’s a second when all you can remember is a sum of what they’ve told you, which makes no sense anyway, but the problem is that you remember all of that shit but you can’t even remember your own name.”

“The worst.”

“Do it a few more times and you’ll have to check your passport as a reminder.”

“I’m pretty sure some people don’t even bother anymore,” Luhan shrugs, casting his attention across the room, “But it can’t be that bad. He gets to open the show. Maybe it’s like a sacrifice.”

“The ultimate crisis. Identity or accomplishment.”

“Character or usability.”

“Imperfect human or perfect hanger.”

“Do you think hangers worry about things like these?”

And Kyungsoo wonders, too.

••••••••••••

There is a certain sort of finesse in carrying on an exchange of exaggerated nothings and Kai’s got it down to the very core, ghosting along drowsy syncopated tunes in the back of a dimly lit jazz bar (quote ‘the bar with amazing ambiance’). It’s not the same nowhere as the first place they had stumbled into, all pink noses and ears and Bombay Gin on the double; charming excited nervous darting glances on top of fumbling fingers. But it’s still nowhere, since Kai is found of meeting nowhere at no time, and he’s still sporting a distracting scarf—dazzling sequins added tonight for the mocking hiss of _‘tough glamour bitch’_ —perhaps with the hope that if it outshines him, then no one will see his jaundice-colored cheeks.

Kai’s voice floats along the chinoiserie and vanishes without a trace into the secular decadence of lanterns, coppers, and cigar-infused bourbon cocktails. He talks about everything, which amounts to zilch except maybe the familiar trail his toe skimps from Kyungsoo’s ankle to his knee. Up, down, up, up, down.

“I’m free for the night,” Kai says, “One of my fittings rescheduled and _I missed you_ , hyung.”

Still Kyungsoo tries clinging onto Kai’s consonants ( _hyung_ ) but grasps only salty lust and soured sentiments and alcohol’s fuzz and the cold magic in Kai’s black stare and nothing. Nothing. He grasps nothing because there was nothing in the first place. A hundred and eighty-seven centimeters of flawlessness sitting right in front of him and not the slightest hint of an existence.

“Are we in a relationship or not?” Kyungsoo’s demand hangs awkwardly over the air. The weary blues wheels to a standstill. An interruption of poorly-timed laughter from the neighboring table.

Kai’s expression goes blank for one beat, and not a second more, “My new place has a good view of the—”

“Kai—”

“…can see Oxford Street if you lean on the…”

“Kai.”

“There’s a jacu—”

“Kai, STOP IT!”

Kai blinks. The napkin in Kyungsoo’s hands is rough and hard like stone. He hears himself wheezing and hates it so bad that it only gets worse, “I’m Do Kyungsoo. I’m Do Kyungsoo from Seocho, Seoul and I like taro plants and I think my neighbor’s boyfriend is secretly a robot, and I hate how my neighbor sings the same fucking song in the shower all the time but I have the same habit. I watched Pororo when I was a kid and when I get nervous I forget stuff and at one point or another, or maybe even now, I kind of want to be a chef. I clean all the time and sort my shirts by color and type because I like control. That’s why I’m a make-up artist. The control. I like the control. I like knowing what things are and what they will become, making it and estimating it with my own two hands. I’m Kyungsoo but who, really, the fuck are _you_?”

The silence stays. Red light splinters down Kai’s side, a little fuzzy around the corners. Jaws clenched, fingers curled, and eyes soft. It’s another million-dollar pose. Kai doesn’t move (portrait of fear as a young man), so Kyungsoo leaves instead.

“Let me know when you figure it out.”

••••••••••••

Italian suburbs in transition from winter to spring are best viewed at night, with rows of little suns lining each street and the darkness drifting behind corners, wafting in with a faint scent of daylight. The asphalt is wet and there’s a light drizzle, but Kyungsoo doesn’t really notice. He’s not sure what street he’s on, or what time it is, and for some reason it feels alarmingly as if he’s gotten caught up in another möbius strip and even more so that he’s too lazy to walk out of it. It might be the alcohol, except he’s not drunk. It might be loss, but he’s certain he hasn’t lost anything. Maybe a prolonged one-time deal with an idea.

(For Kyungsoo romance is something slightly evasive, inconvenient, and naïve. It’s something that you both regret getting into and out of.)

Perhaps he’s fallen out of a romance, overlooking the problem that it was very straightforward, convenient, guarded, and something like a twentieth century horror flick with an ending that was doomed from the start. Maybe it wasn’t a romance. Maybe it was just something to regret.

(Relationships go something like this: fascination, lust, disillusionment, rage, then the inevitable falling apart.)

So he continues dragging himself down the half-deserted sidewalks, lined with substandard motels and sawdust restaurants. Maybe somewhere between disillusionment and rage, he’ll bump into someone. The non-ideal canvas.

••••••••••••

No one ever pulls the disappearing act backstage of any runway, let alone Jean Paul Gauthier’s, but Kai does.

Kyungsoo is in the midst of highlighting recycled ash phrases on adolescent features when he hears the familiar where’s Kai weren’t you just talking to him; and I don’t know he was around just a second ago and he said that he needed to go somewhere—we can’t have a fucking show without a damned face to open it, you moron—but he looked _fine_ really, he didn’t look upset or anything during the rehearsal so I just thought...

Once again Kyungsoo rushes down the corridors, fast as the hysterical crowd will let him, this time with no kit thumping off his shoulders. There’s half a prayer in his throat. Half a prayer, half a vulgarity, half a plea, half a threat.

But no semi-cadaver is there to greet him behind half-cracked bathroom doors. Just a yellow sticky-note floating in the toilet bowl, one word scrawled on top in unmistakable handwriting: “Kai.”

He flushes it down. His hands are shaking, and maybe he's laughing.

••••••••••••

Kai resurfaces eventually. They end up in the same functions because the intersection between Beijing-Seoul-Tokyo-Milan-Paris-New York is terribly small like that. Sometimes Luhan is there with Sehun and a rubix cube, generously chatty about timing and tricks and two-minute records, to average out the fact that neither Kyungsoo nor Kai will speak first. Sometimes Zitao pops in the corner to ogle the way Kyungsoo shapes Kai’s face with wordless reverence and a pen and notepad. Sometimes the occasional photographer swings by and takes a shot of them: Kai’s squinty fixation, Kyungsoo’s searching glances, and the book with ink that might disappear (but it probably doesn’t matter because Kai is by the end now).

Most of the time they ride out the silence; Kyungsoo watches Kai chase words across the pages, Kai looking into the mirror to monitor Kyungsoo every once in a while. Their gazes miss, by a lot a little.

“What do you usually think about,” Zitao demands, poking his head over Kyungsoo’s shoulder as he packs up his utensils at Kenzo SS13 in Beijing, “when drawing on a perfect face like that?”

“Making it better.”

“Don’t you worry that you’ll shade things wrong? I mean, it’s already perfect so how do you—”

“It’s make-up, Zitao. Water, carbomer, DMDM hydantoin, acid blue. Not permanent marker. If you do it wrong then you just start over. Plus there’s no such thing as the ideal face, anyway.”

At the end of Spring/Summer, Kyungsoo catches a glimpse of Kai on television while wasting away time in an airport terminal. Striding down the catwalk hips squared and chin tilted, he supposedly embodies the prodigal son of the retro rock-and-roll. But not quite. Within his usual dark glower, there’s an insolent prick gloating and it’s wrong in all the rightest ways.

Not really perfection, but very, very close.

••••••••••••

Dawn catches Kyungsoo in last night’s jeans, sun burning into one cheek, clammy bed sheets stuck to the other, and something buzzing in his pockets with mechanical persistence. Kyungsoo reaches over to smack it, though somehow he ends up knocking over a stack of notes on his pillow.

The paper tower topples in slow motion and Kyungsoo watches it with a pre-emptive groan. This is the typical Seoul morning at home: dulled headaches and curtains being ripped open, unread emails and milk delivery kids ringing bells one too many times. Charming, albeit obnoxious, especially with Baekhyun singing in the shower about his mother and shooting anonymous and how on earth can he be majoring in English, really.

But Kyungsoo thinks that this side of Seoul is more preferable than an exclusive view of blue waves and flocking seagulls and breakfast in bed. Not very picturesque and completely human. He flips his phone open and stares.

“I’m Kim Jongin,” is written quite clearly in twelve-sized Batang font. Three extremely clear, extremely foreign words.

Kyungsoo leans back into his pillow, head thudding with what should be a hangover and some faint memory of whining drunk to an exceedingly nonplussed Baekhyun on the subject of new taro plants.

“Who’s Kim Jongin?”

“Was hoping you’d open the door and help me figure that out.”

So he opens the door and Jongin simply stands there with his hands stuffed in pockets, eyes downcast and chin digging into the collar of his off-white hoodie. Shuffled feet, disheveled hair, callused knuckles linger over the handle of a small suitcase, neon yellow JFK-ICN airport tag rather distracting. Cheeks pushed up and teeth biting down a nervous grin.

“I’ve never seen Pororo,” Jongin declares, a bit too loudly, and Kyungsoo hears Baekhyun’s blinds screeching open, so he drags him inside and slams the door before Chanyeol yells something about I’m recharging and just because you’re famous doesn’t mean you can do whatever okay.

It’s when they hear Baekhyun’s blinds slide back and the peace return that Kyungsoo notices his grasp is too tight on Jongin’s wrist.

“What did you say?”

“I’m asking you to take me to see Pororo.”

Kyungsoo thinks that he probably looks like a moron as he chimes, “You won’t regret it. Pororo is better than Broadway.”

“We’ll see about that.”

Pororo ends. Eventually Jongin puts his hoodie on again, steps out the door saying the same “Thanks for the food, hyung” and slams it before Kyungsoo can ask to leave together. Kyungsoo chews on his tongue, but it’ll be okay this time because Jongin’s left his suitcase behind. And the dust is clearing, will clear, one day.

••••••••••••

They’re booked for New York Gucci again. Haven of yellow cabs, human bodies pulsing down the streets, hints of blue through congested clouds and construction workers poking heads out of manholes like “Whack-a-moles,” Jongin claims, “Wait, are you sure we’re on the right street?”

Summer breaks into autumn with light pouring down the sides of skyscrapers, air conditioner too cold, hair colorists whining about this and that and models loitering everywhere they’re not really supposed to. Typical backstage chaos. Typical middle-classed children dressed in high-classed glamour, feet too big and smiles a little confounded, a little tired, albeit excited.

“Hi, I’m Luhan and my hometown is Asia,” Luhan says, poker faced while a perplexed frown crawls over the reporter’s brows.

“He lifted it,” Sehun snorts off to the side.

Kyungsoo and Jongin turn in unison, “What?”

“It’s my copyrighted poker face and he stole it,” Sehun clarifies, pouting enough to hang a spoon off his lips, though he immediately straightens up when the camera turns to him, “Hi, I’m Sehun, and I’m also from Asia.”

The reporter seems to have seen better days when she finally sizes up Jongin, exasperated sigh already hanging over the question, “And you? Is your hometown also Asia?”

“I don’t actually have a hometown,” Jongin shrugs, “But I do go to Seoul a lot.”

“What for?”

“Things,” Jongin meets Kyungsoo’s wide-eyed stare, but he doesn’t smile. And he doesn’t really need to.

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> (the unearthing of 2012 fic, part 3 of too many)
> 
> Thank you for reading ❤️


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